Margaret Renkl

The raw material for Renkl's 2019 nonfiction book, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss, arose from a weekly blog she began as she and her husband dealt with caring for Renkl's parents and mother-in-law. The book interweaves short pieces on nature and the natural world with family stories and memories from Renkl's life. Renkl had not planned to turn the material into a book, considering the blog a way to process her grief. "I found that I took a lot of comfort from watching the natural cycles in my yard. I didn't actually start writing the nature essays until a few months later, when the primary season for the 2018 election really started gearing up. And all this ugliness was coming out." The book, which includes artwork by Renkl's brother, Billy Renkl, received generally favorable reviews, though some critics found the book hard to characterize.

Renkl taught high school English at Harpeth Hall, a private school in Nashville, Tennessee, from 1987 to 1997. She quit teaching after a difficult pregnancy with her second child, and spent years freelance writing for various publications, including Glamour, Guernica, Literary Hub, Oxford American, and River Teeth. In October 2009, Renkl founded Chapter16, an online literary magazine featuring Tennessee and Tennessee-adjacent writers. She stepped down as founding editor after ten years. Renkl's work began appearing in The New York Times in 2015, with an essay focusing on caregiving for elderly relatives. Soon after, she was offered a weekly column, writing early pieces on the backyard drama of nesting birds and the way the 2016 United States presidential election played out in her local neighborhood. Renkl devoted fifteen years to writing poetry, but eventually focused more on prose after concluding that poetry would "require an intensity and concentration that ultimately I just don’t have."

Margaret Renkl (born October 1961) is an American writer and contributing opinion writer for the New York Times who lives in Nashville, Tennessee. Renkl is the author of Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss. Her weekly opinion columns focus on nature, politics, and culture.